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Leads vs. deals

Breandan Flood, July 15, 2025

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Understanding the difference between leads and deals can help you structure your sales process more effectively.

While both represent stages of potential revenue, they serve different purposes in your sales cycle. Learn more about lead management in this post.

Leads

A lead represents a potential sales opportunity linked to a contact or organization that has yet to be qualified. They’re perfect for initial outreach when you’re not ready to actively track these opportunities in your pipeline.

Leads Inbox is a dedicated space to organize and work on your prequalified leads before they become deals. Here are a few things to keep in mind about leads:

You must link a lead with either a contact person or organization, or both
You can use leads to organize potential clients, converting them into deals

You can learn more about lead management in this post.

When you click on the “...”, you can:

Find any deleted lead on the restore data page within the first 30 days after deletion
Export and import leads, with correct global permissions access
Access the data cleanup page with deal admin permission

Deals

Deals represent qualified sales opportunities linked to a person or organization that you’re actively working on. They move through the stages of your pipeline until it’s either won or lost.

Clicking on a deal opens its detail view, where you can see any linked contacts, products, projects and activities.

You can also see information about recurring products, documents, files and emails exchanged with the linked contact.

Note: For more information about deals, check out this in-depth article.

You can learn more about deal management in this post.

Leads vs. deals

You can think of a lead as a starting point and a deal as the next step when you’re confident the opportunity is worth pursuing.

The table below shows the main differences between leads and deals, helping to understand how each can best serve your sales process.

Feature	Leads	Deals
Link to projects and products	No	Yes
Create documents and upload files	No	Yes
Can be created through Leadbooster tools	Yes	No
Can be archived	Yes	Yes
Invoicing	No	Yes
Formula fields	No	Yes
Participants	No	Yes
Goes in a pipeline/stage	No	Yes
Changelog	No	Yes

Note: You can create deals by using web forms and chatbot features, which are part of the Leadbooster package.

Converting leads to deals

Note: When you convert a lead to a deal, Pipedrive transfers the linked person and organization details, along with any lead notes, mentions, comments, activities to the new deal.

List view

Once you decide which leads should be qualified, you can easily convert the highlighted selection to deals and add them directly into your pipeline to start your sales process. Select them in the list view and click “Convert to deals.”